carry on

every morning lately, there is yoga and poetry, usually also tea and the New York Times crossword. 

(okay the daily wordle and the daily worldle make their daily appearances too.)

the poetry at the moment is not just any poetry, but that from a new collection by Amanda Gorman. I mentioned her in April for national poetry month. what a talented young woman, indeed.

her latest book it titled in a muted gold all-caps. the cover behind that is a simple bright blue striped with what could almost be clouds, but aren't quite. when you look closer, they come into focus as the soft edges of torn paper. 

the best lines I've read so far from Call Us What We Carry are in a short poem called "& So," on page 25. I don't know if they'll sound as cool out of context. but oh well. you can go find the book and read the whole thing yourself any time, right?

"This truth, like the white-blown sky,
Can only be felt in its entirety or not at all.
The glorious was not made to be piecemeal."

and 

"Since the world is round,
There is no way to walk away
From each other, for even then
We are coming back together."

I have plenty more poetry in this collection alone to get to and savor all summer long. plenty to be grateful for, for now.

warm weather and vulnerabilities

I love being barefoot.

I love the feeling of clean carpet or tile or concrete under my feet. love walking on cool grass or warm sand or slick mud.

thankfully Arizona gives us plenty of good being-barefoot weather, overall. I avoid socks at all costs unless I'm jogging or hiking in actual shoes.

being-barefoot weather is upon us for good now. spring! summer break mere 3 weeks hence!

it's exhilarating and intimidating, the idea of summer. I won't be teaching. what will I do? how will I choose between all the crafts and writing and projects and excursions and naps I want to fit in? 

maybe I can figure out a way to do it all. (there was a pretty cool podcast episode from Maisie Hill about that, just last month.)

we shall see.

first I need to survive the semester and all its grading, meetings, lesson plans, presentations, and commencement shenanigans. 

I will. we all will. all 97 of my students and I and my colleagues too. 

somehow.

April is national poetry month, isn't it? 

I'm not a poet-- not really. but sometimes my brain thinks very poetically.

I like to read poetry. 

even more I like to hear poetry read aloud. seeing it on a page isn't quite good enough usually.

this poem, "The Hill We Climb," from a whole fifteen months ago, is a good and grand tear-jerking hopeful poem to listen to. 

to read it silently-- well, it might still be good. or it might seem long and uneven, or as the post I linked to just there has it, too dense.

what are the best parts? it is hard to choose. and pasting them here won't do any justice to how they sound in Amanda Gorman's own voice.

listen and watch the whole thing first:

and now, here are the most moving sections for me-- these three from near the beginning, middle, and end:

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

and

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? 

and the last few lines, singed with cliche just at the edges--

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid. The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

maybe I ought to go looking for more of Ms. Gorman's poetry.

 

for the record, I've been reading various other non-poetry lately, including:

The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey  (not the winner of this year's Tournament of Books)

Poet Warrior, by Joy Harjo (recommended via yoga church friends)

Trigger Warning, short stories by Neil Gaiman

The Marvelous Clouds, by John Durham Peters

and 

A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde (the same one who wrote Common as Air, which I managed to cite in my dissertation) 

 

here's to springtime and reading and being barefoot as much as possible. 

springtime words

not very long ago at all I actually stopped and read this poem, "Optimism" by Jane Hirschfield, posted ephemerally somewhere somehow by the instagram account Poetry is Not a Luxury. 

it is a poem from a collection published in 2005. not very long ago at all. so it isn't in the public domain, or anywhere close, and so I haven't copied it in full for this post.

but I will write out a meandering ode to what I thought about when I read it + what I am still thinking about.

and what I want to remember about it.

it is difficult to explain what's lovely about a poem. is there a truly effective way to make you see or feel the same satisfying resonance or resonant satisfaction that I felt when I read it, or reread it? doubtful, given that even just recalling what it was like to catch myself reading this poem for the first time seems pretty impossible.

part of it is in the journey-- simple, with a first-person subject and her point of view in flux. her admiration evolving. and we get a collection of sturdy nouns as an anchor along the way: resilience, resistance, tenacity, intelligence, persistence.

I'm reminded of friend Trinity once talking with me about the merits of resilient as an alternative to the buzzier buzz-word sustainable. what's the point of something sustainable if it won't resist or withstand a few worst case scenarios? sustaining a system in good times isn't the same at all of sustaining it through a disaster. so we need some more words to talk about more possibilities.

speaking of contrasts, this poem gives us pillows vs. trees. 

the stubbornness of a same shape over and over vs. the sinuous tenacity of remolding yourself to follow the brightest light, wherever you find it

these words. the journey of them.

you can see the pillow, its impermanent dents. perhaps that resistance is worth admiring sometimes too.

and you can see the tree, green and pliant, with branches reaching, shadows falling in its way. 

some part of me, finding herself somehow pausing long enough, focused enough, to let these words in properly-- she relates to the tree, to the feeling of being forced to cast around for different light.

and then the beautiful ending. the contrasting conjunction that breaks down any fear we might have about our blindness preventing any growth.

"But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, / mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth."

these words. the tip tapping -ence, -ance, -acity of those nouns, and the -ome, -oam, -uous, -ose, -ous, and -able. the sounds of them and the feel of them.

the words in this order like this evoke so much hope even without the title tying a neat bow around that authorial intent. the hope of small turns, motivated by whatever subtle senses we may or may not understand, leading steadily to so much wild and undeniable beauty.

it feels almost like I've just written some kind of literary analysis of this poem. maybe a third of one, or something. I did not grow up to be a literary scholar, so a third of an analysis is probably just fine.

in other news:

we painted some of the walls of our new house a few weeks ago.

oh yeah-- we bought a house. it feels so very grown-up of us to have done such a thing.

next exciting house project: patio furniture.

I am excited for the end of spring semester. for consistently warmer weather and more time to be outside, to sleep, and to read whatever I want. our new nearest public library looks awesome (though its fairly basic clunky website does not quite match, I must say). it has a little cafe, open 7am - 3pm, and I really hope I can arrange my life in a way that allows a few future mornings here and there sitting with books and notebooks and tea in a library cafe. what could be better than that?

nothing momentous

can these miscellaneous photos become something else if I throw them together in a blogpost today? can they tell a real story or scaffold the lines of a poem?

for me there are wispy old memories inside each one. the past curls up, loose and wriggling, in little mental pockets marked with "autumn 2015" or "July 2016" or "that one conference in Rochester, NY."

but what are they for you? 

evidence? or art? or both? it probably depends on who you are.

plants in a garden. plants on a windowsill.
all in the middle of growing, dying.

or both. 

all of it part of some cycle. up. down.
rainfall, rainbows,
showered on or sheltered from.

or both.

 

writing or drawing, or both. seeing or listening, or both

being or breathing. 

but not or-- and.

always trying for and.
or failing. 

or both. 

along with the wispy memories, there are deep and unpredictable tides of emotion, too. a longing for the pieces of these pasts that have faded too far. a fear of losing all the people and connections that once felt so close and certain. amusement and nostalgia drizzling from clouds of wonder about why everything feels so impossible.

little by little

here is the front of several hours of weekend weaving. five different yarns. green cotton warp thread. the weaving itself is probably about three inches high. not sure how many rows of weft, total-- why would I count?

and here is the back:

I made this frame loom from one of the frames my dad and I made a few Christmases ago, which was itself made from old baseboards out of an old building. 

The Weaving Loom blog has been very helpful for instructions and inspirations. 

I have four or so more kinds of yarn I've pseudo-planned to add in. some cream, more yellow, two shades of red, and a little more variegated. it's hard work, weaving in and out and around. I'm excited to see how the design develops.

I took the photos with the weaving at the top, but in practice I'm weaving from the bottom up. I wonder which way I'll want to display the thing when it's done. whenever that is.

 

--

as a postscript, here is a photo I'd forgotten I'd taken of another Audre Lorde poem.

When you are hungry
learn to eat
whatever sustains you
until morning
but do not be misled by details
simply because you live them.

Do not let your head deny
your hands
any memory of what passes through them
nor your eyes        nor your heart
everything that can be used
except what is wasteful...

unprepared for proper wordsmithery

the third section of the Audre Lorde collection I've been reading is about two hundred pages of poems. here, for this Friday evening, are some snippets, in no particular order, of all the ones I would have dogeared if it weren't a library book.

I wish I could record "Song" for LibriVox. such lovely slant rhymes and even measures.

Wild trees have bought me
and will sell you a wind
in the forest of falsehoods
where your search must not end...

it keeps going in that steady, almost hypnotic way for six more dreamy stanzas.

"Sister, Morning is a Time for Miracles" has this great little metaphor about words being destructive. I could re-read this and think about it for a whole weekend.

Reaching for you with my sad words
between sleeping and waking
what is asked for is often destroyed
by the very words that seek it
like dew in an early morning
dissolving the tongue of salt
as well as its thirst...

I almost couldn't stop quoting from "New Year's Day." top to bottom, this one is a perfect jumble of different feelings and judgements and senses. it is a poem you could shrink down and live inside, fleetingly.

This day feels put together hastily
like a gift for grateful beggars
being better than no time at all
but bells are ringing
in cities I have never visited
and my name is printed over doorways
I have never seen

Extracting a bone
or whatever is tender or fruitful
from a core of indifferent days
I have forgotten the touch of sun
cutting through uncommitted mornings
The night is full of messages
I cannot read
I am too busy forgetting
air like fur on my tongue
these tears
do not come from sadness
but from grit in the sometimes wind.

the opening of "October" is another one I just want to re-read, re-imagine, over and over. it's another poem you almost want to live in for a little while, just until it gets too chilly.

Spirits of the abnormally born
live on in water
of the heroically dead
in the entrails of snake.

Now I span my days like a wild bridge
swaying in place  caught 
between poems like a vise
I am finishing my piece of this bargain
and how shall I return?

the opening question of "Change of Season" hits heavily. a confrontation.

Am I to be cursed forever with becoming
somebody else on the way to myself?

and the rest unfolds more and more on identity and memory. uncertainty. 

of course I like poems with questions in them. here is the entirety of "Fantasy and Conversation," because I could not choose only a segment and none of it is quite as awesome without the rest, anyway.

Speckled frogs leap from my mouth
drown in our coffee
between wisdoms
and decision.

I could smile
turn these frogs into pearls
speak of love
making and giving
if the spell works
shall I break down
or build what is broken
into a new house
shook with confusion

Shall I strike
before our magic
turns color?

I also really liked "Spring People" and "What my Child Learns of the Sea," which has such a gripping image here with the line "of the ways / she will taste her autumns / toast-brittle or warmer than sleep / ..."

for this Friday, on which it might thunderstorm or it might not, could I write my own poem?

in her preface to this collected poetry, Lorde herself talks not about writing poems but about building them, and about re-building them if they prove a little out of joint.

to build a rightly-jointed poem right now, here, behind this blinking screen, would take more time than I have to spare, I think. instead, for now, I'll prosify the sounds of stormclouds, the weight of a workweek in my shoulders, and the strewn-everywhere coziness of a shared life-in-progress with whatever thin words I can. poetry can live outside of poems sometimes, I think.

completely, partially

my latest LibriVox contribution-- The City of Din, by Dan McKenzie-- surprisingly made its final journey through the prooflistening stage rather quickly this week, and I am pleased to announce that it's been officially catalogued here for all the world to enjoy if they so desire.

the most unique part of this audiobook is that our pug Wesley has a role in it. in the middle of section 2, Mr. McKenzie is discussing whether to categorize dogs as noisy or not, and he re-enacts the inner monologue of a man trying to sleep while a dog barks somewhere out in the neighborhood. rather than boringly intoning the word "bark" myself, I conveniently captured some of Wesley's insistent barks and used those instead. it took a lot of editing work, but I think it was worth it.

LibriVox relies on the Internet Archive for the bulk of its hosting needs. everything on that LibriVox.org page I linked to above is really pulled in from Internet Archive, where it's all displayed a little differently.

the Internet Archive is undeniably awesome. you probably agree, right? I hope so.

unfortunately the organization is dealing with a pretty awful lawsuit at the moment, one that has some terrible implications. this thread from author Cory Doctorow goes over the issues concisely and forcefully. there's been quite a lot of talk about the lawsuit all over twitter, lately. I very much hope that these greedy print publishers don't succeed in wrecking the Internet Archive's plans for facilitating free circulation of digital books. what an awful world it would be if we had to pay greedy corporations for even the most temporary access to any of media at all.

in all my researching and theorizing about the Internet Archive and similar projects, I've more regularly thought of it as what it has named itself-- an archive. a collection. a carefully stored pile of carefully gathered and curated and digitally infrastructured content. 

libraries are that, too. what's the real difference between a library and an archive? well, some archives are a little more closed-off to the public, but other than that, nothing. they are both, like so much else we humans are about, places to keep things.

sometimes I also think about these digital archives as communities, too. they are collections of things--artifacts, manuscripts, whatever... but those collections of things don't just happen without people. that's what my dissertation was all about: people working together to build archives by building tools that help them build and maintain and expand the archives. LibriVox is a really cool example of that.

I have gotten to know some of the other people who work with LibriVox, a tiny bit. some of them I feel like I know from studying the history of the site and listening to all of the old podcast episodes. some I have interacted with more closely on various projects. it would be fun to meet some of them someday, as I've done with other internet friends. who knows if that will happen or not.

two years ago I read the closing sections of this L. Frank Baum story, Phoebe Daring. the project had been initially started on LibriVox in 2015 as a solo, by a reader who worked on dozens and dozens of LibriVox projects but died before she could finish this one. when the community learned what had happened, they opened her project up and ten of us completed the recording and prooflistening work for it.

thinking about that makes me wonder what I'll leave unfinished. who will finish it. ideally I'll have several decades to keep thinking about that question.

this week, as I approached the end of this month of blogging, I kept coming back to the concept of ...well, I guess of incompleteness. but that word feels overly negative. what I was really thinking of were partly-complete things. partly-done, partly-finished. parts. partialities. my mind has been more or less fascinated lately by the idea of everything always being partial.

in some sense, that can be a negative thing. the partial nature of so much can leave me so unsatisfied. so paradoxically full of what isn't there or what I haven't collected.

in another sense it's comforting. there's still more. it isn't over yet. we have some space to add and grow and keep going. that's the side my wondering wants to be on the most.

July, however, will be complete after today. utterly in the past, over, done, gone, irretrievable. and my month of blogging will be, too. that, at least, is something finished. how I'll look back on everything I've posted in another year, or five years, who knows? but from here, it's done. perfect enough because that's what we (the royal we) decide to call it from this precious, precarious vantage point of now.

Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?

No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the
ground and sea,

They are in the air, they are in you.

   -- Walt Whitman, "A Song of the Rolling Earth"

more listening

what and who do you find easy to listen to vs. difficult to listen to? I've had reason to ponder this lately, mainly with regard to diversity and tolerance and such. but of course, as I tend to do, I'm getting broad and philosophical about it.

my favourite things to listen to include:

- rainfall

- string instruments

- well-structured podcasts while I'm working with my hands

- chill, lyric-less music while I'm working with my brain

- husband Jeremiah playing the guitar

- vegetables sauteing or sauce simmering on the stove

- soft, gentle pug snoring

there are probably many more that I can't think of right now, too.

sometimes there are voices I get really sick of hearing, or that I'm impatient about listening to. I tell myself that it's not because of the voice itself, but some quality in it or some context around it that makes it insufferable. the ponderous, over-thoughtful droning of too many academic podcasts. the hyper-critical griping of various YouTube reviewer guys. or the two-dudes-talking podcasts that for whatever reason can't seem to edit out even a shred of their blathering (ahem).

I have limited time in my life. I can't be expected to truly listen to everyone. being picky is not a bad thing.

but lately I'm thinking listening as activism. I'm thinking about who we listen to as a crucial moral and political choice. (it isn't always that, I hope, but it can often be that. the personal is political, they say.)

part of what sparked this thinking of late was my slowpokey journey through the Me and White Supremacy workbook. I've been going through each chapter, journaling as earnestly as I can about each prompt (me and tone policing, me and white superiority, me and white silence, and so on). along with a few of the prompts there are a videos from the workbook's author, uploaded back when the book was still just a daily instagram challenge. and the videos are long. some of them are over an hour long.

listening to a stranger talk to me for that long (and about a subject so potentially touchy, at that) takes some discipline. focus. commitment.

in the first section of her book, Layla Saad has said as much. love, truth, and commitment: we won't get through this workbook and its work without those things. and I feel like I need to re-read that section of the book every other day, to help me keep going and stay committed as the discomfort of unpacking all the ways I'm steeped in white supremacy soup intensifies.

listening to a voice that's so different and so passionate isn't easy. the videos that go with the book aren't totally unscripted, but they're conversational. they're personal. it is so easy to say I don't have time for all that.

for me, putting off this set of intense, fine-grained confrontations is convenient. I have every excuse to put it off for next summer or the summer after that, and very little pressure from the outside world to stick with it.

but... as Ms. Saad writes, in address to white people like me and almost everyone else I have ever closely interacted with,

"Whether or not you have known it, [white supremacy] is system that has granted you unearned privileges, protection, and power. It is also a system that has been designed to keep you asleep and 'unaware' of what you having that privilege, protection and power has meant for people who do not hold white privilege. What you receive for your whiteness comes at a steep cost for those who are not white. This may sicken you and cause you to feel guilt, anger and frustration. But you cannot change your white skin colour to stop receiving these privileges, just like I cannot change my black skin colour to stop receiving racism. But what you can do is wake up to what is really going on, challenge your complicity in this system and work to dismantle it within yourself and the world."

there are things I can't change and things I can change.

maybe I can't change my basic inclinations to choose Margaret Atwood's The Testaments off the digital library shelf instead of buying the more 'experimental' Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo's from an airport bookstore. but I for sure can reconsider those basic inclinations and push myself and my brain to include more non-white voices more often. even if (perhaps especially if) those voices seem strange to me.

in this vein of feeding myself more Black voices, I requested some Audre Lorde from the local library the other day. I mostly wanted to read the oft-recommended Sister Outsider, but the copy I found of that collection also included two other works of hers: Zami (semi-autobiographical loveliness) and Undersong (poetry and such). the blurb on the back cover about Zami, the first of the trio, didn't sell it in a way that grabbed me. but as everyone should do with any book they happen to find in their hands, I read the first few lines of it anyway. and it is loveliness. lyrical, thoughtful, evocative, full of allusion and depth and feeling.

previously, the only Audre Lorde I'd ever read was in an Argument Theory class during my first round of grad school: "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." (it might actually have only been a section of it; mainly I remember that we discussed-- fitfully-- whether or not one could discuss an argument's structure and effectiveness without discussing the argument's content). I'm looking forward to reading more of her.

I will keep reading and listening to Layla Saad, too. I've also added the more-conversational-than-I-usually-want-to-tolerate Pod Save the People and the deeply educational and impressive 1619 Project to my podcast queue. is it enough? who knows. it feels like barely, barely enough to be beyond tokenism. it's not likely to be enough to thoroughly crack through all the ways I've been conditioned to prefer and validate white voices over any others.

because poetry.

there's a scene in John Green's latest book, Turtles All The Way Down, where two teenagers sit next to an outdoor in-ground pool and the young man's simple bits of poetry, spoken off-the-cuff under the stars, seem to successfully unseat the young woman's (the protagonist's) spiraling, paralyzing anxiety.

it was a very lovely scene. and it made me think back to a headline I'd seen just a day or so earlier: "How Doctors Use Poetry."

upon first clicking that link to that headline, I read as far down as these few lines:

"...reciting poetry engages the primary reward circuitry in the brain, called the mesolimbic pathway. So does music—but, the researchers found, poetry elicited a unique response. While the mechanism is unclear, it’s been suggested that poetic, musical, and other nonpharmacologic adjuvant therapies can reduce pain..."

and then, a week or so later, I finally came back to read the whole thing. and eventually look up the cognitive neuroscience study the author references. I wanted to blog about this. because poetry.

because the idea of communication beyond the 'restricted' language of 'science' is interesting. because feelings and power and pathos and transformation feel important.

perhaps something about this time of year makes poetry feel especially necessary. seasons changing. colder, darker times pressing in upon us. stresses of the semester intensifying...

I often think I should read and savor more poetry more regularly. but sometimes it doesn't seem accessible or convenient. making space for poems isn't always easy.

our lovely local poets here at NSU have offered me an excuse for savoring plenty of poetry lately though. they're participating in a month-long poetry marathon to support a small indie non-profit literary press. one poem every day, for almost all of October. I like it. maybe there's something about knowing that poems have been written under a time constraint that makes them especially delicious and interesting.

almost all of these poems evoke some kind of emotion. some ask more patience of me than others. I like the ones that make me feel pried open, or guided dot by dot around a gallery of newness, or plunged into a deep ocean.

all the poems of the 30/30 poetry-fest are on one webpage, which makes it difficult to send you to the ones I like the most. you'll have to search a little bit for them. some of my favourites so far:

• A Study in Time and Space / by Rebecca Macijeski
• God owns a carwash in Iowa / by Ally Schwam
• Two Heads / by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
• Camelot’s Redemption / by Chad W. Lutz
• If I could make this easy / by Jen Stewart Fueston

and there are still 15 more days of poems to be written! if you're into it, you can donate to the press and incentivize our lovely local poets this month, here and/or here.

more poetries, previously:

• Emerson
• my littlest sister  
• Whitman
• Cummings, twice
• Kay
• Rilke 

also, all of this poetical literary mashup film by Yulin Huang is very cool.

soaking-in and stirring-up

friend Patti and I have driven miles and miles and miles in the last week. across all the states between Indiana and upstate New York. up and around to Toronto, and back, and across and through and along. I'll put up photos eventually. there has been ice cream and yoga and wonderful views and confusing traffic and much adventure.

who was it who told me about David Antin?

{ this is a photograph of northwest Missouri from ten years ago. random, I know. }

it was someone at the Digital Humanities Symposium I went to during finals week, earlier this month. someone was talking about genre and medium and sound recordings. it was someone making a point about what poetry is, and as they did so I wrote down a mis-spelled version of the poet's name on my hand.

reading David Antin poems in pdf does not seem very fun. I will have to consult the library.

in the meantime, when Patti and I are not on our way from here to there in a car, and when I have not been writing article drafts and planning my summer teaching adventures, I have been reading various other things. books I picked up at publishers' exhibit halls, books Patti passed on to me after she read them for the tournament of books, and books that stowed away in Patti's trunk when we left the states.

a list:

Gold, Fame, Citrus (irritating in spots, otherwise good)
So You've Been Publicly Shamed (rambly yet thought-provoking enough)
Between the World and Me (I want my dad to read this)
Go Ahead & Like It (lovely, evocative, simple)
The New World (bewildering and sudden)
Our Souls at Night (sweet. poignant, even)
Bats of the Republic (a puzzle)
Information Doesn't Want to be Free (inspiration-sparking)
The Mermaid's Sister (tedious, vague, bleh)
The Blue Hour (poetry snippets, dark, tattered)

only two of those are non-fiction, everyone. and only one of them can at all be considered research/dissertation-related. but don't worry. I spent three and a half days at a marvelous Computers & Writing conference. I learned so much, took so many notes, resolved to do so many things, and have plenty of whirring ideas caged up for later use. research/dissertation-land will not be abandoned.

this David Antin fellow does not 'write' his poetry. he talks it. oral poetical rambling, recorded and transcribed, and then published.

that sort of poetry is not a thing. it is an event, a production.

but how dare we trap any piece of writing in nouns?

processes. hows, not whats. and I have so many questions about how. why? how? those are where my questioning mind goes. why speak your poetry instead of write, type, paint it?

well, why not?

I was about to wish for my summer to have just as much writing and creating in it as reading and consuming. but how would I measure that, when the reading and soaking-in is part of the writing and building? how would it make sense to compare? I could force it to, I suppose... but it might be more interesting not to.

for now, I have picked up Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, another stowaway book from Patti's trunk. its book jacket promises fairy-tale twists in an aloof and mysterious vein, and its first section title seems to be "The Golden Afternoons." I hope it is good.

let the future take care of itself

presents. gifts. nows. time. times here and there. I am thankful and hopeful. it's easy to be that during these weeks of break, during this time of low obligation and high relaxation, of sleeping in and plenty of yoga and not having to go out into the dreary snow-spitting outside unless you really want to.

I am reading Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. friend Chris sent it to me and said it was very me. I am not far into it yet, but I can see what he means. it is also reminding me a lot of my posthumanism class from last semester.

the blurbs on this paperback call Camus lyrical. and eloquent. it is a stolid kind of lyric eloquence, I think, almost plodding but just light enough to not feel like twenty pounds of paving stones.

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again." 

and that reminds me of this quote:

a quote I read in Richard Power's Orfeo last summer when I should have been studying more dutifully for prelims. "Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't yet destroyed."

it comes at the same thought Camus does, a little bit. the unfamiliar is some necessary core to beauty. and alienation is part of that.

I have almost the whole Camus essay still to read though. there will likely be more quotes from it tossed into my everything notebook, as I read.


these are a $2.50 pair of goodwill shoes that I bought just before a Saturday lunch date last February. they are still sitting in my pile of shoes at the bottom of the stairs, but I think they are beyond wearing. too smushed and stretched and scruffy, lacking all the sturdiness a wearable shoe should have.

these are a not-quite-as-cheap-but-still-cheap pair of flipflops that I bought in Hawaii in 2009. I wore them past the point of unwearableness, until the sole of one split in half and tripped me as I crossed a busy intersection one day. these are not still at the bottom of my stairs in a pile of other more wearable shoes. I took photos of them and threw them out that very day.

I took photos of these trashed shoes because... because why? they seem sort of beautiful. though maybe that is more due to the backdrop of my autumn porch. I'm not sure. these shoes took me places. they became ragged and deteriorating and a little bit grimy, and thus more interesting.

time. nows. things that are here right now won't always be. shoes get worn out. everything does. there isn't any easy way of un-wearing shoes. newness. presents.

I have plenty of shoes and don't need any more. plenty of books, maybe, and for a week or so plenty of space for dreaming and sleeping in, too. what do I need? what wants will accompany me into a new January? which ones will got met and well-traveled and worn? good questions.

supernatural or subnatural or both

everything in the world today looks like art.

lines of cut grass. fluffed and fraying cloud-piles above the trees. rust along the rims of wheel wells on all the cars parked along this shady street.

it sounds like art, too. cracking twigs. singing birds. even the drill some guy is using to repair some bit of the third-story windows of the Purdue Memorial Union.

the artistry of all that is probably just in my head.

last Friday I went to go see a delightful outdoor performance of The Tempest. this play is such a lovely one. and the local young folk who put this show on did very well. it was funny, it was paced smoothly, and it looked beautiful. the weather was fittingly grey and the backdrop of trees and bike-trails very easily became a random Mediterranean island for an hour and a half.

one of the most interesting features of this performance had the sprite Ariel played by four actors. four young girls with braids and flowers and ribbons in their hair and fluttery woodland-ish outfits. they had great singing voices. every moment they were on stage they moved, swaying, dancing, creeping and flitting from here to there across the corners of the set. sometimes they spoke individually, sometimes in chorus. one of them played the violin a few times. very neat.

I'm currently reading a book called The Rook. one of its characters is also a supernatural being called Gestalt--either quadruplets sharing one mind or a single person sharing four bodies, depending on which way you want to think of it. three of the bodies are male (two identical and one fraternal), and one is a woman. they can be in multiple places and do four things at once, but it's really only one human, with one identity. weird.

it was pretty cool to encounter two fictional four-part people in the same week. I wonder if they'd be friends if they met. both seem to have a streak of mischief in them. but I'm only partway through The Rook. Gestalt is starting to look like a villain, but it's too soon to be sure.

twentyeight: pointe

this is the whole world this time of year. blossoms, fat and frilly and clumped like tiny baby ballerinas. the light--when the sky isn't all April-showers, anyway--caresses them so gently, so goldenly.

look there, across from the bus stop on State Street. an arrow pointing to a tree. one with froths of flowers all around its edges. and off to stage left, sunset wandering in, all nonchalant.


besides blossoming trees everywhere, I have been noticing and noting some other cool and inspiring or interesting things. here they are, roughly in order from most-recently noticed to longest-ago noticed.

musings on animal-obsessed traffic engineers over at 99% Invisible. odd.

from Rhetoric: A User's Guide by John Ramage: “however much our language may fool us into thinking that we must choose between the two states, we all know better. Who has not described themselves as being ‘half awake’ or ‘half asleep,’ drowsy or wakeful? In our lives we experience the two states as lying on a continuum that we forever move along, experiencing more of one and less of the other but never fully ‘outside’ either..." (p. 29)

found listserv poetry by the lovely and brilliant and delightfully thoughtful, cemetery-loving poet-rhetorician-hybrid Beth Towle. I hope Beth will forgive me for all the gushing I will continually be doing about these little poems. I love them a lot, and I don't even know how to explain it.

on grade school male privilege by Shannon Hale.

this annoyingly captioned but morbidly beautiful instagram feed of stylish junk-food. why does this exist? well, who knows. but it does.

thirteen: unlucky

not even the heady scent of fresh-mown grass or the sweep of springtime clouds and breezes--not even a strawberry ice cream cone--none of it, nothing--has succeeded in lifting me up out of this well (deep, deepening, deeper than yesterday) of what if why not when where how not why which who why why not but why. I am choking on feelings. smothering.


there are no stories in this. no sense. the universe is sinking me.

six: but too soon for bare feet

today was quite grey. I am weighed down with exams to write and books to read, review, takes notes on. this time of year--it is excruciatingly stressful and/or teasingly wonderful and/or wrackingly mixed. depends on the day.

I am wanting to rearrange furniture, and walk outside in the rain, and sing or dance or leave. 

but I have exams to write. 

this song and Jason Mraz's very nice voice accompanied me home from the bus stop earlier. the match of grey anxious twilight longing seemed beyond perfect.

microscopic ice palaces

last Tuesday, my local world was made of tundra. the photo here isn't as striking as all that delicate golden foliage was in real life last week. you'll have to imagine the way it managed to shine and glint even in the grey, flat light of wintertime noon.

six days later, a change of the clocks, a turn of the page in my calendar-book, and a good two-thirds of all that tundra has disappeared. the sound and the sparkle of wet, melted ice remind me a little bit of this April day five years ago.

but April has not arrived for us. there are not diamonds dripping from the trees--not yet. the semi-cruel dreariness of wintertime is only barely beginning to thin.

and I have been thinking about slush.

a not-solid, not-liquid, half-melted stuff, slush. sometimes cohesive enough to walk upon, other times not. sometimes accepting of your footprints, other times not.

the indeterminate, transitional nature of slush. of course this is a thought my brain would enjoy swirling around with. I'll blame Postmodernism class (not that I need anyone or anything to blame).

sometimes my brain gets gently hooked by the tiniest, strangest, half-invisible ideas. the word you used there--'engaged'--does it imply more purposefulness than makes sense to imply in this situation?

or that word we always tend to use here--'about'--what kind of connection does it really invoke, and is that connection always the same in all the alwayses where we use it? what if it isn't? what if this preposition isn't all the things we secretly want it to be?

or this word--'melt'--that I want to use as a verb in seventeen different ways right now.

melt. I am thinking about slush, melting. but the slush is not only melting--it has been melting, it was in the middle of melting, and it is unfinished with melting.

yeah. melting. a process. a thing happening to the slush. but this doesn't seem good enough. it's like there is too much between-ness to fit in-between the two extremes of unmelted snow and pure water. 'melting' is too easy a word for this. I want more words. I want words for all the gradual states of change: the warming, softening, glittering, thawing, re-crystalizing, crumbling, smushing, cracking, re-freezing, dripping, hollowing, breaking, re-thawing, slurping, sloughing, hollowing, sluicing, slipping, and slushing of slush. do the eskimos have nouns for all those moments? hm?

the point is to live everything

I picked up Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet for a few moments at a party in October. sometimes, I behave rather anti-socially at parties. music, small talk, and hors d'oeuvres aren't always quite enough. I want my eyes to have more to look at, my hands to have some kind of project or game. so at certain kinds of parties, even though it might be weird to be embroidering while the music blares, or crocheting as the small talk happens, or browsing bookshelves inbetween hors d'oeuvres, these are things I have been known to do.

the music and food and company at this particular October party was all lovely. the bookshelf of poetry in the corner took up a small set of moments that night, but those moments popped back into my head when I came across a quote from Rilke's book earlier. recently, On Being joined the handful of podcasts on my iPod, and I have been letting old episodes play in the background of my housework and bus riding. they are sometimes a little too earnest, these soft, meandering conversations between curious, profound people. there is almost an overly-tender, tenuous idealism hanging over it all. but usually they're interesting despite this. so when a friend posted a link to the On Being blogpost of today, I let my intrigue follow it, trailing its author from Anne Hillman's poem and the Rilke quote to the five questions below-- and eventually to google where I found this digitization of all ten letters. the inspirational tidbit in question is from letter 4. "have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language," translated Rilke advises. I was talking to my clever sister about this earlier--about the complex value of holding pluralities and indeterminacy in one's head. uncertainty is precious. ignorance is room for discovery. darkness and shadows make cradles for the candles and the lightbulbs. the blogpost at On Being suggests that to not know = to be alive.

these are the questions Parker J. Palmer has come up with, remixing Rilke and Hillman into New Year's inspiration:

• How can I let go of my need for fixed answers in favor of aliveness?
• What is my next challenge in daring to be human?
• How can I open myself to the beauty of nature and human nature?
• Who or what do I need to learn to love next? And next? And next?
• What is the new creation that wants to be born in and through me?

I love questions. how they lead to more and more and more unknown, unsettled, untraveled spaces. the idea of living in the moment, living in questions, feels excessively appealing. and here, in no particular order, are my pondering, tentative responses:

• keep asking questions. around and about and underneath all the answers you think you might be setting in with, there are always more questions.
• prepare for and take responsibility for the things you want, even if you aren't sure you want them, even if you aren't sure how or why or when or what will happen as a result.
• get a haircut.
• walk to school one or two mornings every week.
• collect and cultivate a few more potted plants.
• listen more selflessly.
• write on paper. take more notes. make more connections among the books and articles and conversations.

these aren't all. I'll come back and keep pondering.

years and their turnings are indeed arbitrary temporal thresholds. every millisecond could be just as momentous as this one we're waiting for at midnight tonight. that the digit at the end of 2014 is switching by one is pretty neat, and this sort of switch does only happen once every thirty-one-and-a-half-million seconds, but given the way we quantify time, every single moment some digit of the timestamp is switching, spinning, ticking away. we could use every one of those ticks as an excuse to throw confetti, to dance, to live. every moment is a beautiful new question.

you are not made of metaphors

this poet came to perform this week, at my little university in this little Indiana town. 

...okay, neither the town nor the university is all that little.

Sarah Kay, famous for these poems, that TED talk.

I keep thinking about this poem, "The Type." wondering who I am.

last Tuesday, in a long, narrow chair-filled faculty lounge at the Purdue Memorial Union, she performed several pieces, some from her new book, some moving and poignant, some sappy and silly, some in between. it was very fun.

we were discouraged from making recordings ourselves, but you, if you were not there (or if you were), can, thanks to this internet wonderland, find and watch recordings of some of the same poems performed at other venues, at other times.

"Montauk"
a story full of time-skips, summers, expanse

"No Matter the Wreckage"
which made me wonder about men as ships and women as sailors, so seeming backwards.

"Private Parts"
as I doodled all over this bit of scrap paper (black ink courtesy my own pen, pink courtesy a pen borrowed from the nice fellow-who-accompanied-me-to-this-poetry-performance) I made notes on idea from this poem: "corners sanded away, the parts that once only fit one person."

now that I'm blogging about it, I had to look up the real bit of poetry I was trying to capture at the corner of this doodling. it's more specific. it's more evocative. it's real and if you listen, you'll hear the line, just there:

and the years have spread us like dandelion seeds, sanding down the edges of our jigsaw parts that used to only fit each other.

I of course want to take the idea of that--the kernel of memory of touch and meeting and change--and run with it through a lot of stretching, complicated thought-work. will identities always be settling, smoothing? what does this mean for eternity, for unity? does who we are ever stop losing uniqueness? will this time, these years, ultimately lead to inevitable mass conformity? does it ever work backwards? can we hope for getting sanded into less-smooth, less-conforming, more-particular pieces? why or why not?

hmm.

these poems I've linked weren't all, of course.

the piece about South Africa was very sad.

the one she said she'd never performed before--"Dragons"--was intense.

of course that toothpaste + bicycle tire love letter made us laugh.

I have work to do, other than poetry and other than blogging. but I keep thinking.

letting.

being sanded.

adaption

starting this week I've had my students doing reading presentations with selections from our textbook Convergences (it's an old book, but look, it does have one of those publisher-sponsored companion websites--full of dead or dying links).

I had each student choose a piece to practice and measure and then read aloud to our class. it's my way of forcing them to 1. actually pay some attention to that textbook they paid a non-insignificant chunk of money for and 2. think about literacy and reading from a more auditory and external perspective, not just a visual/mental/internal one. will it work? so far nobody has complained too terribly much.

our first two presentations were on Thursday.

one student began with this piece by David Brooks.

thought-provoking. guilt-inducing.

next, his fellow student abridged Matt Snyders' write-up of one week at the Mall of America and threw up a little powerpoint to go along with the story.

we cringed. we laughed.

presentations next week will include excerpts from Richard Rodriguez's "Gangstas." there might be costumes.

it's an old textbook, compiled of articles that exist in many other media incarnations--books, articles, photography collections, poems, comics, reviews. seeing how the students abridge and adapt these pieces for a potentially very bored audience is going to be very fun.

if my class didn't already hear too much from me every day of the week, I'd be tempted to read something to them as well, to join in the project. something from David Eagleman's Sum, perhaps. or one of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales.

our adaptations in class are pretty simple. but they're leading into our last unit on media, where we might have room for talking about re-mediation of all kinds. book-to-film-to-comic-to-stage-to-radio-to-thesis-to-interpretive-dance and everything.

maybe I will show them some of these, from the marvelous and very sweet-seeming Yulin Kuang, one of the brains behind Shipwrecked Comedy.


isn't that lovely? all of it--the voice, the light, the wide outdoors and cozy twosome?

yeah.

postscript 1:
in my poking around after details on Marina Keegan the other month, I came across this rather fantastic channel featuring the Yale spoken-word-poetry group. does Purdue have an organization like this? should we start one? eh, friend Priya?

postscript 2:
and did I ever mention The Moth? someday I'll perform a story for The Moth. but which one?  

midterm excerpts

fuel coffeeshop. a few Fridays ago.
not pictured: Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing, with accompanying notebook and pen.

somebody asked me the other day what mind-mapping software I liked to use.

I muttered and gestured to all the notebooks in my bag. paper, of course. not sure it counts as software, being made of dead trees, but whatever. I map things into my mind using paper. that way I can doodle in the margins or write sideways or crisscross crazily between this note and that note. for example: the first leaf of the blue spiral notebook I've been keeping notes in this semester has some boxes, some circles, a sketch of an envelope, some numbers, some squiggles, an octothorpe, a non-existent email address, one question mark, four arrows, the word ungrateful in all caps, and the advice to Sing in Your Own Voice, followed immediately by the words blue ink in parentheses. on the verso, there is an overwhelming amount of math. I'm pretty sure all of this was written in late 2010 or early 2011, when I was studying for the GRE.

the rest of that blue spiral notebook is now full of notes from this very fall, 2014, my second year at Purdue University. I've had to start a new notebook mid-semester, which I guess is what comes of using one already half-used-up notebook for three different seminars + lectures + practica. because it's midterm-time, and because looking back at these notes might be a useful thing to do as I begin writing proposals and papers and essays and project reports, and because this blog needs more academic nonsense plastered all over it, here are some snippets from it. they don't always transfer very well to this stringent, linear, typographic medium. ah well. I can add hyperlinks to this version though, so that's something.

what does this mean? more money for ____ / quality +
find out the impact ★ 

agonism / movement
metis / arete / kairos / phusis / hexis

observing with no aim other than
normal/everyday
interaction
why that now
what next

ignoring ≠ not noticing ★ 
how to become sensible to things that are unremarkable? [doodle of fish under water]
ethnographers must join the fish but also remember what water is

tech separating creative process from production process --> bigger businesses
telegraph typewriter filing cabinet railroad copy paper

definitions need definers (+ attendant power structures)
I keep thinking about SUITS.

disconnects between writing/docs and + real expectations
or impossible to articulate things
beyond expertise

work (n)
work (v)
internal + external articulation

writers not writing.
interesting nod to Kant

"elite" / "male" / "western"

nature + functional historical knowledge (a formalist approach)
chronicle > story > mode: plot, argument, ideology

mystical / sociological / cultural models
unities / Weltanshauung, paradigm

★ sentience ★ consciousness
making of the world
torture - "torque"/twisting
terror - "to tremble"/terrible

useful vagueness!
scripts     schema
quantifying "shared knowledge"

rules tacitly learned
instruct > interpret > act > assume > instruct > interpret ....
making the world match the words

digital iterations are quicker
do machine made songs words art get copyrighted?

Taylorism = basic (time) task efficiency -->
Fordism = specialized production
functionalism = prototype prod. line + labor management
art?
passive / normative / or creative / or reactive

could machines cook?

what if actions are our bigger understandings of interlinked systems of interactions all working together? (more philosophically cool)
or we could see interactions as bubbly frothy conglomerations of discrete actions? (more etymologically consistent)

★  ideas precede expression
but we learn names before concepts.....
essence ≠ substance

man = ?
biology?
no immovable boundaries
men make sorts
nature makes qualities/matches

a set of subjects memorizable / polymathical
"tristapaedias"
categories / relationships / authorities

self-evident character of prison
war functioning as if...
prison NOT functioning as if... but pretending to try? <-- a="" br="" does="" how="" media="" play="" role=""> the Last Lecture Randy Pausch

practical advice / ❤ + integrity
"if small faults are to incur such grievous punishments, there can, indeed, be none found sufficiently sever for great crimes." (Edgeworth 245-246)

norms as processes, assumed in forming identities
legible / livable vs unlegible / unlivable lives / spaces
e. exclusion, boundaries exposing limits of constructivism

p 37 - always already material
centering the world symbolically
lack of control = castration

subject
abject

containing multitudes. [I was thinking of Maya Angelou at the time but really, Walt Whitman said this.]
"if the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, the unconscious necessarily exceeds the individual + becomes thinkable as Social + Cultural...

power (opposed to) ornamentation elitist finery
puritan austerity

Com 621 Social Media
Com 605 PW

blending sacred motherhood w/ secular moneymaking

regularity / order / harmony / sense

Beauty   Harmony / this sounds like Hume ^

ch 3 Zuern / "what we seek to master is the control of the cultural meaning of the body ... our offering of our bodies to the world as meaningful" p 62